Hospital employees pose as drug addicts, regret it

Chandigarh, June 4 (IANS) Taking drugs is dangerous for health. But as some contractual employees of a government hospital here found out, even posing for pictures as drug addicts can be detrimental to your interests. Government Multi-speciality Hospital here in Sector 16 used the services of four of its contractual employees for promotion of its drug de-addiction centre.

The centre was inaugurated by the administrator of Chandigarh May 25.

The employees were asked to act and pose as hard-core drug addicts and their pictures were used on the brochures and other advertising material.

Pardeep Kumar, who has a contract for the laundry in the hospital, said: “They distributed these pamphlets with our photos all over the city and one of them even reached the house of my fiancee. Now they want to call off the proposed marriage as they think I am a drug addict.”

“Some of the senior officials of the hospital are threatening to terminate our contract if we tell the truth to anybody,” Kumar claimed.

Vinod, another employee of the hospital, said: “I never knew that it would have an adverse impact on my reputation.”

A senior official of the hospital, on condition of anonymity, told IANS: “The hospital did it because they wanted to show that there was a good crowd in the centre. The hospital wanted to portray the image in the society that these are the people who were once admitted here but now they are living a normal life.”

However, the administration of the hospital refuted these allegations.

“As per our policy and set guidelines, we have to keep the details of the patients admitted in our centre confidential. We could not publish their photographs on the brochures and distribute them everywhere,” Narender Kumar Arora, medical superintendent of the hospital, told IANS.

Arora added: “This allegation is quite baseless that we made use of our staff to show the popularity of our centre. Our centre is already very popular and everyday we are getting inquiries from patients.”

“But still we would conduct an inquiry to make sure that there is nothing fishy in this issue,” Arora said.